The everyday life in the GDR in individual, cultural and political memory

Abstract

The subject of the analysis is the individual, cultural and political memory of everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, practised after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East Germany with West Germany. The analysis uses the methodology of Aleida Assmann, which indicates the blurred line between individual and collective memory, dividing the latter into political and cultural memory. According to Assmann, all these types of memories play an equal role in the construction of national identity. The author analyses the memory of everyday life in the GDR in relation to the forms of commemorating the political past of communist Germany. The space of political memory was dominated by the subject of repressions carried out by the communist security service (Stasi). The author emphasises that this situation led to the exclusion from the social memory of the activity of the political opposition and the experience of the communist regime by ordinary people, as well as to ignoring the fact of the diversity of social memory. The memory of everyday life, excluded in public spaces, is represented mainly in literature and film (Good Bye Lenin!) and in private museums (Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt). The author also analyses the challenge of incorporating the history of the GDR into the common history of Germany, due to the trivialisation of the former and its displacement in the space of the mass media. He critically evaluates the attempts to implement the policy of memory to date, citing the example of the “House of History” in Berlin – a project that removes the diversity and ambivalence arising in the space of memory for the sake of its unification. According to the author, the right goal can be achieved by distinguishing four groups of memory politics: “division and borders”, “surveillance and persecution”, “everyday life” and “opposition to the dictatorship of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany”.